Lore

By Craig Robert Saunders

The ship Orpal searches the far realms of space for an answer which might heal an epoch-old rift between the three great factions – the robots of the Tradition, the Ecentrists, and the Lore. He travels with the hunter Jiall Kyle Iris and his genogun. Confident of their abilities, each excellent in their fields, and now neck-deep in the nascent war about to embroil every form of sentient life in the universe.
*
The Tradition stand for power, grandeur, remembrance. On the other side of the scale the Ecentrists weigh heavy. They wish for a cataclysm unlike any ever known, one large enough to sweep aside the obsolete. If the Tradition and Ecentrists sit either side of the scales, perhaps the Lore are the scales. A higher intellect, they are peaceful, and as such remain distant from the growing strife. But they watch, for the Lore once knew war. 
*
Behind each move Orpal makes is a darker influence – Habla'saem, the socioassassin. The killer of societies throughout history, a murderer of empires, he moves pieces in a game only he can see, and this time the socioassassin's designs are greater than ever...

His sights are set on the annihilation of the Lore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fable Books
• Release date: Jun 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386708704

Craig Robert Saunders

Hi. I'm Craig Robert Saunders. I write science fiction under this name. Lore is my first pure science fiction novel. There are more forthcoming, inc. three books for Severed Press.  My complete author profile: Craig Saunders is the author of forty (or so) novels and novellas, including 'ALT-Reich', 'Vigil' and 'Hangman', and has written over a hundred short stories, available in anthologies and magazines, 'best of' collections and audio formats. He writes fantasy as Craig R. Saunders, science fiction as Craig Robert Saunders, but publishes the majority of his fiction as 'Craig Saunders'.  Imprints: Dark Fable Books/Fable Books.  Likes: Nice people, games, books, and doggos. Dislikes: Weird smells, surprises, and gang fights in Chinatown alleyways.  He's happy to talk over at: www.craigrsaunders.blogspot.com  @Grumblesprout Praise for Craig Saunders: [Masters of Blood and Bone] '...combines the quirkiness of Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas series with the hardcore mythology of Clive Barker to create an adventure that is both entertaining and terrifying.' - examiner.com [Vigil] 'A gripping accomplishment.' - Murder, Mayhem and More. 'Saunders is fast becoming a must read author...' - Scream. [Bloodeye] '...razor-sharp prose.' Wayne Simmons, author of Flu and Plastic Jesus. 'Plain and simple, this guy can write.' - Edward Lorn, author of Bay's End.  [Deadlift] 'Noir-like, graphic novel-like horror/thriller/awesomeness.' - David Bernstein, author of Relic of Death and Witch Island. 'A master of the genre.' Iain Rob Wright. [Spiggot] 'Incredibly tasteless, shamelessly lowbrow, and very, very funny.' - Jeff Strand.  [A Home by the Sea] 'Brutal and poetic...' - Bill Hussey, author of Through a Glass, Darkly. [Rain] '...the best book I've read in a year.' - The Horror Zine. [Cold Fire] '...full of emotion and heart.' - Ginger Nuts of Horror.

Book preview

Lore

by

Craig Robert

Saunders

Prologue

Habla’saem

Shell Ship/Unique Class

Society mocks its creators as the higher races laugh at gods.

This was the man’s recurring thought, a man stood at a holowindow looking out upon the loneliest of an unknown planet’s fifteen satellites. He was named Habla’saem. He was not laughing. He wasn’t a creation, or a creator. He was outside that futile loop.

Habla’saem killed.

Soft eyes and cherubic features on an improbable body spread like old snow drifts in heat, pallid and greying, flesh sliding down bones weakened from a long life in low-grav. Ice chinked in the thick swirling spirit in a rare, finely cut glass in his hand. Meteor rain battered the moon outside while he drank, seated on a curved full-body seat in his shell-ship as he took in the show. His legs, barely used, sank into soft fabric. He looked out across the vista, a form that was pitiful in the eyes of nature’s merciless power.

He alone would choose this place of rage for peace. There was no danger to him within his shell. Polarised fields protected the composite shell, constantly realigning energy formations effective as waves buoying driftwood across a shifting surface. The shell protected him from life and death, the risks outside too great. His was a body that had never felt the heat of a sun holding a mind which had seen countless suns cease to be.

He pulled another long drink as he watched the burning rain-fell outside, puffing out already swollen cheeks and swilling the harsh liquid against barren gums.

The Com-K link had shaken him. It was only natural that they would want him, but he was unsure; the Ecentrists spayed morality was as devoid of fertility and warmth as the battered landscape before his eyes. There was beauty in what he did and beauty was something the Ecentrists could never appreciate.

Morality was no consideration for Habla’saem. Immoral art his may be, but all art requires an audience, or else why would the creators have made such a universe? Just to have it ignored?

To that end, why create society if it was not to be toyed with?

Hmm, he muttered, took more drink, and sighed.

The Ecentrists would never understand, and perhaps his art would be lessened for the lack of an appreciative audience but then...

There is a certain beauty in the secret art, is there not?

Was it not always so? When has my audience ever been appreciative?

He put his drink aside, mind resolute. He would meet the Ecentrists. He would perform his obligations. The Ecentrists, the Triumvirate which ruled their faithful were at least straightforward in their short-sighted, long-lived idiocy. Plain thinking was trait refreshing in a life such as Habla’saem’s was – a virtually endless existence surrounded by subtlety and subterfuge.

For Habla’saem, a socioassassin, to kill an entire race, whether he received his due recognition or not, would be the highest accolade.

His was a lonely job and satisfaction, ultimately, his alone.

He had destroyed many societies before, and it was fine thing worth savouring, just like the filter spirits he preferred with their grain and humours. This, though, was more than just the death of a society, or a world. It was the death of an entirety; the entity known as the Lore. Their death knell would resound throughout the universe.

Habla’saem reclined further, a slug of a man with a wet smile upon his face.

Nothing he did truly mattered. Revolutions, genocide, rebellion...empire’s ebb and flow. All were nature’s tools. Given time it would all end the same way. The realisation that all ends regardless came early in Habla’saem’s life. He had been in his millennials, he seemed to remember. He lost track of the finer details of time.

The universe could easily take the loss of a galaxy with a shrug and simply birth one anew. Such immense, glorious creation would take longer than Habla’saem would be around for, but then it was not birth that interested him but the death that foreshadowed it. Nothing could be born without death, not since the making of existence itself. Even for existence to be nothing had necessarily been slaughtered. Oblivion herself, from which the stars, matter, darkness, life, and been torn.

For a new sentience to be born an old sentience must die, no?

Subterfuge worked best where the minds were subtle, and if those raw materials upon which he scratched out his art should be able to think collectively? The Lore did have a collective consciousness, and as such the challenge would be fresh. Almost exciting. The more he thought on the nascent, commissioned art, the surer he became. The wider that wet, fat-lipped grin on his pale face. His hands, usually steady, even shook just a little.

I, the universe’s sole socioassassin. How could I possibly refuse?

He had no peers. Cataclysm? Maybe. War? Hardly.

This attack would not, could not be silent.

Subtlety was not the weapon for the Lore.

That very night, Habla’saem moved his first piece in a game he had not yet openly agreed to play. He played endlessly, whether he faced an opponent or not. It was his game, his rules, and it began when he decided.

In the morning when he took off for the Lanta system the first move was made. The wide, effervescent star-sarong of the Fretful Seas faded away.

Until Nol Sar, he whispered, and closed his eyes. Patience in large endeavours was paramount.

Part I.

The Long Plans of Ancient Beings

1.

Ore World (Dense)/Una/Subplate Tect

Sect 93/a

Lore

Lore bot 4/45 b/7 Ur Petept NLR_T ¬re shuddered in anticipation. 7/23 (she allowed him to call her by her pet name) finally emerged from her regain cubicle, dripping precipitual lubricant in shining globules.

7/23 emitted a low, deep hum as she moved closer.

Electrical arousal charged the fronmium pulses and the lights began to play. 7/23’s fantastic shell was mother of pearl-effect, each and every seam brightly visible, a mix of the high and low, a statement akin to grandeur. 4/45 felt lasers begin to tease it open, reciprocated. Impulses crackled in the merging cell, and the two, for a time, became one. Its bismuth telluride component reached fluidity at 445 degree centigrade and its heart, in effect, melted.

Love; pure alchemy.

The robot equivalent of sexual bliss was having its higher functions subverted. For a higher being it was, surely, folly?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. The nature of sentience presupposes the awareness of mortality; the confusion of merging cognitive function allowed the illusion of a moment in which all sentient beings, organic or robotic, were beyond the reach of death itself.

Foolishness, or the briefest touch of immortality?

4/45 emerged from its lovers’ domicile and onto the hot, dust-scoured street of the ore planet where it chose to work, and to love. The bot did not think these thoughts but pondered a dark shape which spun toward it, and not much else as a terium coil-round tore through its forehead.

The killer disassembled the long gun and left it behind, lighter on departure from the planet but all the richer for Habla’saem’s payment.

2.

Gas World/Retra/Subplate Tect

PU Nal

Unclaimed

A ship flew free of the world’s yawning gravitation pull under the sound of stretching metal. Oranmium, pressured to fluidity, warped the hull and the ship became elongated. Further, and resistance lessened. The ship’s configuration changed again. Plating reddened, light from the planet’s gaseous energies visible in the thinnest places, then blackened as gravity eased its grip.

A holoscreen map within the ship showed a wireframe image as he broke planetary boundary and reached space. The image blinked erratically; a stylised flat pebble loosed from a giant fist to accelerate across the surface of space.

The ship was known as Orpal and he was an old, old mind. He considered the component placed on a bland metal surface intended for humanoid passengers, rather than for his own use. Orpal had no other form but the vessel of variable consistency and questionable morals in which his sentience was homed. The sole companion in Orpal’s larger endeavour was the man who brought the ragged shard of ancient technology to him – Jiall Kyle Iris.

Orpal and Kyle met when the young man fled from merctile enforcers on a scavvers’ maintenhub. A misunderstanding, perhaps, but a happenstance which suited the ship. Kyle – a simple hunter from an outback planet – hadn’t been in any kind of position to haggle. Good as his word, Orpal gave the man harbour and passage as they escaped through a surgical incision field in the maintenhub’s hull bubble and into space. Since that moment, Kyle became Orpal’s employee.

That wasn’t exactly the right word, but...close enough.

The component – an archeofact – was the first of five pieces in a quest greater than any could imagine. The thing itself was small, seemingly insignificant, a shade over twenty centimetres at the widest section with several unexplained angular struts and spikes jutting out like spines on a mutated deep-sea creature.

Orpal studied the shattered remnant. It certainly looked old. Pre-Enlightenment tech and valuable, but still, it appeared no more than a bauble. Perhaps that was all it was. Orpal’s plans were his own and had been for longer than most beings lived.

*

PU Nal far behind, Orpal waited on Kyle. Silly arse was talking at those damnable eyes again. Orpal found the way the disembodied eyes followed Kyle’s movements nauseating. There was something not quite physics about the whole thing. Existence wasn’t supposed to hold mysteries anymore. There were still people who believed in magic. Idiots and fools, with their comforting religions and lies, just like Kyle.

If there were no fools, though, what power could relics hold? What point in legends like the Cascade emitter?

Didn’t mean superstition wasn’t for fat-headed idiots with their baseless fascinations, though. To take advantage of such childish beliefs was probably morally reprehensible, then. Orpal, however, was unable to empathise with the fickle emotions of organics, though his coldly calculating mind understood the very real effects they had. Without the superstitions and dreams of fools, his long plans would just...fade away.

He knew, too, that his schemes were too heavily dependent upon whims, and chance, and chaos. He didn’t like it...but he had to be realistic. Chaos wasn’t calculable. He’d rather rely on the solidity of numbers. Figures prancing and dancing...that was comforting. Complexity with structured rules steadfastly refused to boggle Orpal. Magic and the unknown made him ache to the core.

3.

Orpal

Sub-space

"I took your eyes. So what? I’m a hunter. It’s what I’m supposed to do. All the time, with the staring."

Kyle spoke to those eyes Orpal hated so much, orbs spread wider at the base where their dead weight pushed them against the shelf. The shelf even seemed to sag under their presence as though the eyes were still attached to the beast’s body. They had no eyelids, of course, but that didn’t stop Kyle taking the endless dour looks as a personal affront.

Killing it hadn’t been easy. Unknown to Kyle, though, a simple hunter from a world in the furthest spiral of the Suhrtraeti Galaxy, everything was about to get whole lot harder.

*

The hunter convinced himself finding a mature Lyenka, a species rumoured extinct and possessed of eyes which saw all, was the will of the Divine. A God-fearing man to whom every blessing, every failing, was the will of Gods unnamed and unnameable to any.

Back on PU Nal Kyle had pulled himself over the carapace of the Gaigan, peered into the murk interior, and seen waning daylight reflected where all should have been matt. The Lyenka charged and as it did, Kyle had been sure of his well-deserved place among the stories of legendary hunters from his galaxy. One-handed, he’d clung to the sly purchase afforded by jagged shell of the dead Gaigan. Then, the cavernous interbelly of the dinosect glowed as Kyle fired and the Lyenka fell, the heavy impact of its ungainly body thundering far louder than the discharge of Kyle’s weapon in the hollow space.

The perfect shot, the perfect moment, and a legendary trophy.

He’d swung over the ledge formed where the upturned Gaigan’s segmented leg pointed to the sky. The eyes